Thursday, July 31, 2008

Lightroom 2 is here!

Well, a week has gone by and a lot has changed in the wonderful world of Lightroom. For starters, Adobe released version 2. With the release, a whole slew of books, blogs, and web sites have sprung up to help users understand why "this is an incredibly significant upgrade ... so hurry and get your copy today."

There have been a few changes to the interface, some subtle and some profound.

The 6 panels on the left of the Library module have been reduced to 3, helping eliminate the fluff and improving productivity.

Collection Sets. You can create collections by area, crime type, or any number of criteria ... and then import your images into these collections.

Suggested Keywords. When you assign a keyword to an image, that keyword becomes a suggested keyword for the other images imported or captured around the same time. This could help speed things up quite a bit.

Multiple Monitor Support. You've got two monitors. Why not use them both?

The Retouch Brush. Local corrections come to Lightroom.

Print to JPEG. You can build a contact sheet and "print it" to a JPEG file for sharing or archiving.

... and there's so much more.

Hopefully, you've been thinking about the questions posed last week. You'll need the answers to follow along with the next post - getting your images into Lightroom. With the timing of the release, I've put the schedule back a week to offer everyone the time to upgrade to version 2. Yes, we'll be using LR2 for the tutorials.

About Me

Jim Hoerricks is a Photoshop Instructor, an Author, and a court qualified expert witness in Forensic Video Analysis who also happens to work for a law enforcement agency in one of the US' major metropolitan areas.